The Internal Enemy

Alan Taylor. The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013.

Alan Taylor's last two books--The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies, and The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution, were both excellent examples of borderland history. Given that this book is set in Virginia, at the heart of the early American Republic, it may seem that his latest work has moved on from that emphasis. But the "Virginia" of the title is really, in many ways, the Chesapeake watershed, and the larger time frame of the title actually frames the much more condensed period when the core of this books' action takes place--the War of 1812. Taylor recounts the history of the British military policy of accepting--and eventually seeking out and encouraging--runaway slaves as military strategy. First tried on a limited scale towards the end of the Revolution, the policy was revived during the War of 1812. The policy had enormous repercussions both for enslaved people and for white Virginians far out of proportion to the actual number of slaves who did manage to escape. This is, in other words, a different kind of "borderland history"--one where the frontier was waterborne, but also where the zone of interaction involved not only competing sovereign entities but also conflicting notions of freedom.

Taylor makes clear the extent to which slaves in the Chesapeake region had intimate knowledge of the regional terrain, as well as nocturnal freedom of movement within their larger neighborhoods that their white owners and neighbors neither fully understood nor controlled. Slaves, forced to work under supervision and duress during the daytime, took advantage of nighttime darkness to carry out visits to neighboring farms and plantations to maintain family ties and other relationships, as well as to carry out social and religious functions and obtain extra foodstuffs and other supplies through theft, pilfering, and other covert means.

Because of this--as well as the fact that many slaves were employed as fishermen, pilots, and sailors--runaway slaves had real military value to the British forces patrolling the Chesapeake. The British sought not only to maintain a blockade, but also to engage in constant raiding in order to acquire needed supplies as well as demoralize and punish Virginian Republicans. Regarding the latter--the British commanders were able to obtain detailed information about the political loyalties of individual Americans, and therefore could choose to punish Republicans for presumably supporting the war effort while sparing Federalists who presumably opposed it. This divide-and-conquer strategy sought to pacify the local population, many of whom were distressed at the failure of the Federal government to provide protection, and thereby undermine American resolve.

This strategy heavily relied on the help of runaway slaves for information, scouting, and providing guidance through tangled waterways and hidden pathways through the countryside. But while the British initially only wanted a handful of individual slaves, particularly pilots, the slaves themselves had other ideas. Family ties were very important to slaves, and given that the declining economy in Virginia had hastened the breakup of slave families through sales of individual slaves further west and south, many slaves realized that if they did not rescue their family members right away, their families could be split apart for good.

So the impetus to escape as family units rather than as individuals was not only strong, it was urgent. The British eventually made a positive of the situation, embracing the idea that all runaways became free once they reached the 'sovereign territory' of a British warship as both a moral good and excellent propaganda to use against the hypocritical Americans, who claimed to fight for freedom while doing everything in their power to keep their slaves from achieving freedom for themselves.

Eventually, the British commanders in the area would create a special corps of marines from these runaways, a military unit which fought with great effectiveness and contributed greatly to British success in the region--culminating in the sack of Washington, DC.

The larger story Taylor tells is how these events fueled the pathological fears of slave revolts which were a constant subtext to Virginia's slave-holding culture, and which eventually doomed emancipation in the state and led more and more white Virginians to silence and abandon earlier qualms about the institution in favor of a more hardline pro-slavery stance, or at least a cynical accommodation to its continued necessity. Only a few thousand slaves managed to escape to the British during this time, but the psychological blow to white Virginians sense of security--as well as to the comforting myths of slaves as docile, content, and weak--was immense.

Freedom National

James Oakes. Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. xxviii + 596 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $29.95.

In writing a history of Republican antislavery policies over the course of the Civil War, James Oakes has in some limited sense brought our understanding of the destruction of the instituation of slavery full circle. Early histories of the end of slavery lauded Lincoln as "the Great Emancipator" and focused on the Emancipation Proclamation coming as a providential stroke of liberation. And for many decades after, it was widely accepted that the Republican Party in general sought the end of slavery. But two very different counter-narratives undermined that former consensus. The "Lost Cause" mythology wanted to deny that the war was about slavery at all; and beginning a few decades ago, many historians came to question the sincerity of Republican anti-slavery. Republican efforts to destroy slavery were presumed to be convenient ideological excuses to justify economic imperialism over the agrarian South by the increasingly industrial North, or a belated--and thoroughly cynical--tactical move to ensure military victory.

This has all led to the wide dissemination of a seemingly 'balanced' conventional wisdom regarding the subject: Lincoln and the Republicans were forced into supporting emancipation almost against their will by circumstance; they wanted to fight a war purely to preserve national unity and only reluctantly shifted to a war to destroy slavery as military necessity dictated. And the Emancipation Proclamation was, depending on who you ask, either a radical break with previous policy which changed everything, or a transparently opportunistic propaganda ploy which changed nothing--i.e., 'it didn't free a single slave.'

Oakes deftly restores Lincoln and the Republicans to a central role in this saga, arguing that the supposed conflict between a war for Union versus one to end slavery simply didn't exist. The war was always fought to restore national unity, and slavery was always regarded as the cause of the rebellion. Republicans were united on those two key principles from the start.

Why, then, didn't Lincoln seek to destroy slavery immediately? There were several reasons. For one thing, his Constitutional scruples--shared by most Republicans--were genuine. But while subsequent generations have taken abolitionist rhetoric about the national government not interfering with slavery in states where it existed as evidence for satisfaction with the status quo, Oakes reconnects wartime arguments over wartime emancipation, state emancipation, and other partial measures within the context of what was by 1860 a well-developed abolitionist doctrine that by containing slavery inside a "cordon of freedom" it would eventually die. The point is repeatedly made that an admission that the Federal government could not overtly end slavery in a state was not incompatible with a belief that the government could and should do all it could to undermine the continued viability of slavery in the States which held on to it.

One of the recurring themes of the book is that the history of emancipation during the Civil War--of the long, bitter struggle to destroy slavery completely (a struggled which outlasted the war itself and Lincoln himself)--has been lost partly because we no longer acknowledge the context in which the Emancipation Proclamation, for example, was written in. Statements by Lincoln, such as the famous line in which he 'admits' that he would have, among other options, kept all slaves in bondage if it would have saved the Union, have been ripped from the specific political contexts in which he said them. Policy decisions and legislation which seem inconsistent and even hypocritical when viewed in isolation appear much different when restored to their place in the larger, coherent narrative that Oakes has crafted.

This is an important book, and a compelling one. Because he is explicitly countering a great weight of conventional wisdom and historical literature, Oakes builds his case slowly, which sometimes leads to repetition of incidents and examples which are sometimes repeated without acknowledgement that he is doing so--possibly a minor failure in editing or simply a rhetorical device that produces a couple of awkward 'double takes' on the reader's part. But that is a very minor complaint with an otherwise first-rate reclamation of a "lost history" of one of the most important developments in American history.